FWIW, I'd much rather read a journalist's take on what Google is doing with messaging than a Google PR piece from a site which mostly writes PR pieces.[1] But there's probably good cause for multiple threads on the topic to be merged together.

[1]Mostly when a company does exclusive interviews with a site, you should be very skeptical of anything that site says on the matter. Especially if they have a design team making custom animations and such for said exclusive article.